A couple readers asked me about the expression “teaching grandmother to suck eggs.” I’ve never heard anyone say this in conversation, but the expression came up a couple times in my googling for last week’s newsletter on weasels and sucking eggs. I didn’t include it because I couldn’t definitively connect it to weasels, or suck-egg dogs (or mules). The origin seems to be a mystery, though we have recorded examples of this expression going back a few centuries. The history of suck-egg grannies is long.
As far as I can tell, it gets used like “preaching to the choir,” ie telling someone something they already know. There’s a nuance in that “preaching to the choir” is about agreements and opinions, whereas “teaching grandmother to suck eggs” is about the giving of advice.
If we work with the assumption that “sucking eggs” is bad behavior, as it seems to be in “suck-egg dog,” etc., then the expression is pretty insulting to people’s grandmothers! It would mean “teaching grandmother a bad behavior (that she already knows how to do).” This is really funny to me, but I suspect the egg-sucking in this expression is a more literal making-a-pinhole-in-an-egg-to-extract-the-stuff-inside action, devoid of the connotation of thievery. Wikipedia suggests that the expression derives from elderly people being toothless and needing to eat raw eggs, but this explanation feels tenuous to me. Why wouldn’t it just be the skill of emptying the eggshell?
At this point in writing these paragraphs, I stopped to ask myself “was there a point in anglophone history when people were regularly guzzling raw eggs?” and now I can report to you that the answer is, in fact, “pretty much the whole time.”
Brits used to drink something called “posset,” a hot beverage made from warmed milk and alcohol that sometimes had an egg in it, which was used as a cold and flu remedy from the middle ages to the nineteenth century, and which is also the origin of eggnog. The word “posset” now refers to a dessert in UK English, kind of similar to what Americans would call “pudding.” Basically you heat up some cream, flavor it, then let it thicken as it cools.
Brief aside that there is a great scene with lemon posset in Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material, and that scene is the only reason I had any clue what modern posset was. Also as long as we’re listing literary references, the old kind shows up in Macbeth—Lady Macbeth drugs some posset to knock out King Duncan’s guards.
Anyway, posset aside, there are lots of old drink recipes, eggnog and many cocktails included, that just have an egg, yolk or white or both, plopped right into them. Not eating raw eggs is a modern concern. Back in the day, granny used to suck all the eggs she wanted.
Also, one last wordy note about weasels and family: a reader let me know that in Québécois, “belette” (weasel) means “nosy,” just like in France, the word for beech marten, “fouine,” is the base for the adjective “fouineux” (nosy).
This week in small-r romance, I read
My Lord and Spymaster (m/f, both cishet, historical) by Joanna Bourne. I mentioned this last week but hadn’t yet finished it. Can we just pause to appreciate this fucking Caravaggio painting?
He was in time. She was still alive. Jess stood alone in a cleared space at the center of the room. Unhurt. Her face glowed like a pale beacon in the smoky dimness. A pace behind her, a dark pillar of threat, Lazarus stood. Dozens of men crowded the walls, pressed elbow to elbow, buzzing like a hive of hornets.
Whew. Anyway, I love a mathematically gifted protagonist and I love a thief protagonist and this book has both and they’re the same character. Good stuff. Content warnings: murder, violence, threat of/mentions of rape, the only references to queerness are references to vice, sex.
The Takeover Effect (m/f, both cishet, contemporary) by Nisha Sharma. I normally avoid billionaires as protagonists, and I didn’t realize that’s what this book had, but by the time I got into it, I was interested enough to keep going. This is a high-stakes, fast-paced story that nevertheless still makes time for the characters to have some quiet moments together, and it was a fun read. I really liked the determined lawyer heroine, all the emotionally complex family relationships, the details of the New York and New Jersey setting, and how beautifully Punjabi language, customs, and food were woven into the story. I will definitely read more by this author. Content warnings: parental death from drunk driving, alcoholism, fatphobia (the only fat character is a villain and his fatness is associated with vice), sex.
Spoiler Alert (m/f, both cishet, contemporary) by Olivia Dade. This book is a treasure and it kept me up way past my bedtime. As someone who has spent a lot of time in transformative fandom, it’s always a gamble to pick up a traditionally published book about it, because you never quite know what you’ll get—but this book captures the joy of getting online with a few carefully curated anonymous friends and collectively tearing your hair out over a show you love-hate so you can all rewrite that last episode a few thousand times. As part of its love letter to fandom, Spoiler Alert is mixed-media, interspersed with tweets, chat dialogues between the protagonists, excerpts from film and TV scripts, and fic snippets complete with their AO3 tags and warnings. The story has two really great romance tropes (a celebrity and a normal person; two people who meet without realizing they know each other under different identities), a lot of good jokes, and a big heart. I rooted for Marcus and April to get their shit together, even when it was 2AM and I definitely should have been sleeping. Content warnings: both protagonists have difficult relationships with their parents, including some emotional abuse, fatphobia (fat protagonist faces insults and fat-shaming from family, friends, and online harassers, but feels good about herself), sex.
Don’t teach your grandma anything, that’s my advice. She already knows.
See you next Sunday!
